A telephone or audio conference (hereinafter “teleconference”) enables multiple teleconference participants to hear and be heard by all other participants to the teleconference.
Chiefly for the benefit of people who are deaf or hard-of-hearing, techniques have been developed that permit the text captions of a telephone call or teleconference to be displayed in close to real-time on appropriately equipped telephony endpoints. An illustrative example is the CapTel™ system by Ultratec. Users of this service may listen to a telephone call or teleconference while simultaneously reading the captions on their telephone's display. The captions are generated by a centralized relay center operated by Ultratec, using Speech-To-Text or STT recognition software corrected by a human reviewer. Communication between the Ultratec relay center and the end-user is via standard analog phone lines.
Within the emerging field of Voice over Internet Protocol telephony, international standards that support the intermixing of voice and text on the same call have already been proposed and adopted. Concurrently, automated captioning services, such as those offered by Ultratec, are becoming more sophisticated and less expensive. Although intended originally for the deaf and hard-of-hearing community, there is no legal, regulatory, or technical reason why such capabilities should not be used to address the needs of others.
There is a need for a teleconferencing system that allows participants to participate in multiple conference calls simultaneously. In particular, there is a need to provide this capability to users of traditional, current-generation analog telephones, digital telephones, IP hardphones and IP softphones. The reason for this need is that, when there is more than one simultaneously occurring teleconference of interest, a participant must choose which conference to attend, or must hop back-and-forth among the conferences. Items of potential interest, that are presented while an individual is in the “wrong” conference, will be discussed without that individual's participation and, possibly, without that individual's knowledge.